discovered_01_2013

discovered 01.13 FOCUS WWW.Hzdr.DE // Physicist Lothar Naumann and his HZDR colleagues are in the process of developing high- performance - and fast - detectors for the CBM experiment at the planned FAIR accelerator center in Darmstadt, Germany. The collaboration is looking for traces of quarks, one kind of elementary particles of matter. _TEXT . Anja Weigl Ultrafast Detectors for Ion Research at FAIR HAIL STORM OF PARTICLES: Detectors have to be extremely efficient and fast to be able to register millions of particles in a short amount of time. Illustration: CBM Collaboration What comes next after Higgs? Or, to put it differently: which scientific topic has what it takes to attract as strong of a public interest (and keep the interest for as long) as did the search for the Higgs particle at CERN, the research center based in Geneva, Switzerland? In any case, particle physics, which has gained a considerable degree of public attention from all this, still holds many unresolved questions and physics problems. Like the evidence for one single quark particle. While we can say with a high degree of certainty that Higgs has in fact been discovered at CERN, no one has yet observed an isolated quark particle – which actually belongs to a whole family of particles. Elementary quarks do not exist in isolation but are, instead, elementary particles involved, according to the Standard Model of particle physics, in the formation of other particles such as protons and neutrons. Just as they have

discovered_01_2013

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